Dragon Age: Magic's Touch
by White Phantom
Summary: The chain of events that led to a young mage's recruitment into the Grey Wardens. Sequel of sorts of Jowan's Fall. R&R, please.


_Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age. If I did, you'd be able to sleep with Sten ._

_A/N: This is a sequel of sorts to Jowan's Fall, in that it's the same mage character. I might continue this, but I haven't decided yet. _

_There are a few obvious differences from the game's story line, but then, it would be boring if I just rewrote the game, wouldn't it?_

…-…

For as long as she could remember, she had always listened to the voices of the arcane. That was why she excelled at magic as she did, though she often took steps to hide it. The templars of her tower were vigilant, always watching for anyone who might 'go too far', fearful that those with too much power might draw the demons to them. Though some mages grew fearful of their overseers and others simply despised them, she never let their scrutiny bother her.

In truth, it was the very magic the templars feared so greatly that helped her to blend in among her peers, and made her a face that, when recognized, conjured only memories of obedience and etiquette. The soft murmurs in her mind needed only offer a frantic plea for her to tread lightly and she knew that her watchers' eyes were upon her.

Every so often, she would catch a templar's attention with something—a spell learned too quickly, an answer too ready on the tip of her tongue—but then, she would simply fall back into mediocrity, her spells lacking the flare of some of her fellow mages, or merely not as strong.

She didn't need her spells to be. So long as she could hear the whispers of magic, she was content. She'd tried to reach out to a few other mages, Jowan in particular, but it had left her somewhat lonely to realize that what her ears picked up so easily fell silently before them. It was as though they were intruders to the realm of magic, forcing the powers that be to bend to their will, while she was simply a part of that world.

Though her dreams were always filled with her travels through the Fade, her daydreams occasionally left her distraught that perhaps she was merely a living spell and that someone would figure it out sooner or later, turn her toward their designs, and she would cease to be herself.

But then, the same voices that she allowed herself to drift in and out of tune with would scoff at her fears and reassure her that she was more than some spell come to life. They knew, for _they_ were spells come to life, powerful and ancient, even during the time of the Tevinter Imperium.

Once, when she had first come to the tower, she had asked someone where mages came from in an attempt to understand why she could hear the call of the ethereal so easily when others could not. That had been met with all sorts of fluster and the adults around her had attempted to skitter around the topic of sex as best they could. Whilst their ramblings had been circular and confusing, she'd gathered that mages came to be the same way non-mages did. It left her somewhat baffled, for surely the answer to why she was so much closer to magic than the others lay in her origin, if only she could learn it.

And so she had attempted to word her question differently, seeking tales of where the different mages around her came from, hoping against hope that perhaps some story would resonate with her and that she might unravel this mystery. After all, if she could learn what it was that had made her so in tune with the fade, then she could share her knowledge, and her life wouldn't be nearly as lonely. The spells had been oddly silent when she had wondered on this, though she had been too caught up in her own thoughts and aspirations to take note.

On this topic, she found others shared their stories much more freely. Some were like her and didn't remember their parents—though they generally did remember coming into their magic, a skill they learned after they were old enough to steal a loaf of bread or run from a guard. Others wove lonely tales of neglect or rejection as they learned of their power. There was a single girl whose parents loved her regardless and sent her letters, though the templars were always quick to read over her shoulder and what little privacy was afforded to her was greatly diminished, and only because her parents still considered her their daughter.

While she pitied that girl, as she was never allowed to write to her parents about the overbearing nature of the tower's guardians—she'd tried to once and that had not ended so well—she also envied her. She didn't know that she'd ever had a real family, not like the ones the others in the tower whispered of. Rather the only real thing that had always been there for her was magic. And even the others who claimed this as well—she was never one to proclaim it, but was more than willing to listen to those who would, looking just as awestruck as the rest of their audience, even through her disappointments—they always proved to fall short in their attunement with the ethereal. Yes, they might be able to conjure an inferno she could never hope to control, but they couldn't hear the pure sound of the magic that flowed freely through the air around them, that seeped into the earth after a rain, that flickered and danced just inside the embers of a fire. They could see the magic, feel that it was there, but they couldn't touch it, converse with it. They could only bend it to their will.

It puzzled her.

She'd known how to communicate with the ethereal and the fade long before she'd ever learned to speak any mortal tongue. It was ironic that that very disconnection to the world of flesh had been what had finally drawn her into it.

During her dreaming in the fade, something unfamiliar had caught her attention and she its. Though she hadn't words for demons or guardians, she was well enough acquainted with each to know that whatever she had found was not a native to the fade and so she had fled from it, back into the waking world.

However, the world beyond her dreams was lonely and far too quiet for her liking, and she found the sunlight that filtered through the leafy canopy overhead made her wince and spotted her vision with shadows. So, after trying to keep herself up for more than a day, she had finally let herself drift back into her sanctuary, figuring that surely whatever it was had moved on.

It had not. And it would not let her be. Every time she dreamt, she felt its presence growing closer and closer. It called to her often, its words bearing no meaning to her senses, and she had quickly been frustrated by its need to use so many syllables to say absolutely nothing.

There was no force behind its communication, no sense of self, no power. It was simply using its lips because it had them, or so she'd thought.

Finally, she'd been unable to stand its harassment and, instead of fleeing from the sound of its voice, had gone toward it. It proved to be much more defined that most things in the fade, as though it were very sure of its own boundaries and had an innate terror that by allowing itself to merge with the world around it, something terrible might happen. It was as though it were a creature of flesh that had somehow stumbled into the world where such definitions were irrelevant.

The creature had spoken to her, yet again in its gibberish. As its voice continued along its never ending cascade of meaningless sound, she had interrupted it, speaking in the tongue of magic, using words that could persuade streams to stem their flow or winds to conjure a tempest, if the intent was behind them. Hers was only to ask a simple question.

"Why do you follow me?"

The creature had stared at her, its eyes wide, as though such a notion were foreign to it. Just as she was considering that it was little more than a dumb animal, chattering away as a cricket might, it had responded. Its words had been broken, as though it could not hear the same call of the world around them. And rather abruptly, she'd realized that the creature couldn't. It knew it was foreign to the fade and somehow, that single thought kept it from being able to be a part of it.

However, broken as its response was, it had finally said something she could understand.

It thought her a poor child, lost in her dreams.

She didn't know what a child was, but she quickly assured the creature that she was not lost. It had eyed her for a moment, considering her words before apologizing. When asked why, it said that such things were right and proper.

It had been a curious response, at least to her. Proper and right were not things that existed in the fade, though they obviously meant quite a deal to this creature if it felt it necessary to voice them. After all, words were power and there was never a point in wasting them. Proper and right had been what had urged the thing to speak to her so quickly in its tongue and those were what had kept it coming after her.

And so, driven simply out of the curiosity of what these concepts might be, she had begun to welcome the creature's nightly visits.

_It_ was a woman, like what she would one day grow up to be. She'd heard the spirits talk of creatures like the woman, but the few who had spoken with her had never offered that she was like them. She had merely been herself. A wanderer and a listener.

Well, the woman asked questions. Always, always. She knew so little of the world beyond the boundaries of flesh and she wanted to learn. And all of the woman's questions gave life to questions of her own in her child's mind.

The woman wondered if the child thought she were a part of the fade and was somewhat confused when she had scoffed at the notion, remarking that creatures such as they could never truly belong to the world of dreams. The woman had tried to tell her it was a dangerous place to wander, but the fade had whispered reassurances that the human's—it was still hard for her to think of herself as the same as the woman—novice comprehension of the ethereal was merely causing the woman to impose her own status upon her companion.

The woman wanted to know what she did when she wasn't in the fade. A peculiar question. When she had been unable to answer, the woman had asked her if she'd made any deals with demons. Or if she knew where her body was.

She had been offended. She hadn't made any deals with anyone and of course she knew where her body was. It was by the pond, where she always left it when she slipped into her dreams. The woman had wanted to know more about the pond. At first it had unsettled her that the woman would care so much about that bland world, where magics' screams came out as bare whispers, easily drown out by a light breeze.

Why would anyone who could see into the fade wish to live out there? She only moved about enough to ensure that her body was strong enough to keep her tethered to it.

How had she known she needed to eat, needed a physical form to go back to, even if she barely used it? How did she know to stay healthy? She did not understand the questions. She had always known. Did the fade tell her that? She didn't know. She didn't remember a time before her wandering.

The woman had seemed unusually giddy during one of their talks and, after asking a few quick questions—she used her own, meaningless words more and more as she taught her companion in the fade to understand them—had ended up disappearing to the realm of the waking earlier than usual.

She had been surprised by how lonely it left her. Time was quite meaningless in the fade and she had never needed another's' presence before. The whispers in the air seemed distant, murmuring that she was leaving them for the world of mortals. While that might have terrified her before she'd met the woman, her new companion had talked so often about the waking world that she'd started to wonder if perhaps there was more to it that she had realized. If perhaps she ought to go out and give it a chance.

The whispers had spoken of heartbreak and a loneliness amplified thousands of times over, should she leave them. It had left her wondering if perhaps humans were their own kind of demon, luring dreamers away from the comfort of the arcane.

She'd spent the rest of her time wandering through the paths of the fade, reacquainting herself with the murmurs that had grown so soft upon her ears.

However, when she'd woken that morning, she'd been quite unnerved to feel someone watching her, even as her eyes had fluttered open, dew hanging on her eyelashes. As she rubbed away the water and sat up, she'd found the woman in her physical incarnation, sitting in front of her, legs crossed and a wide grin crinkling dark circles under her eyes.

It was the first time she could remember seeing another living, breathing creature and it gave her quite a fright. The woman was quick to offer her a hardened loaf of bread in peace.

When she'd tried to ask why the woman had sought her out in the land of the flesh when they had conversed quite well through their dreams, it was the first time she'd ever tried to use her voice and she found that she could not rely on the magic tongue to convey her meanings. It was as though the two worlds were inverses of each other and while that ancient language held great sway in the ethereal, it was cumbersome to try to speak with a living tongue. Instead, she turned toward her sparse collection of human words.

The woman had been thrilled and had scooped her up in her arms, chattering away about things she couldn't even hope to keep up with. She was, however, able to discern a few things. There were dangers in the waking world, men who hunted those who heard the magic's call.

She didn't understand words like murder and apostate, but the woman was fearful for the child, fearful for herself. She'd been running for so long and she was so lonely. That was the real reason she'd reached out to that odd, shifting presence in the fade, which had been barely an echo of a person. When she could tell that the child did not seem overly concerned with the threats she had described and the woman offered her a deal, it hadn't occurred to her that the child simply wasn't aware enough of the dangers, but rather that being so close to magic left the small thing—no older than five when she'd found her—somehow untouchable. It had been a vain hope to reach such a status herself which had pushed her to offer her next words. She would teach the child how to live in the waking world, if the child would teach her how to live in the sleeping one.

At first, the little girl, with startling gray eyes and wild blonde hair full of leaves and twigs that had never seen a comb had only stared at her and she had worried that perhaps the child did not understand enough of her language to accept.

Her assumption was true enough, though that wasn't what had drawn her into silence. Rather, she was listening. The voices around her were in an uproar. This woman, this vile creature, had ensnared their child. She had ensured that the waking world would take her from them.

As the wind whipped about through the trees, creating angry ripples across the water of the pond that the woman dismissed without a thought as weather, the child listened to them mourn her death, which would be imminent. The woman was being tracked. They would follow her here. Even if she chose to stay in her home and leave the woman to her own devices, the world of the flesh would be coming to find her.

A soft caressing voice from the earth had whispered that all that could be done now was to acquiesce the woman's request. The magics had quieted as the single voice continued, explaining that the woman could teach her to avoid the men who hunted her kind.

With no choice, she had accepted the woman's deal. The woman was more than willing to offer her end of the bargain first, intent on teaching her more of those meaningless words so that she could converse more freely.

Her first 'lesson' was in names. The woman introduced herself as Annalise.

She hadn't liked knowing the woman's name. Names were words of power and even in that drab, dead, mortal language, she could feel the connections that such a thing brought between two people. Even as she'd irritably complied the woman's wish to say her name, her captor—for that was what she was—had bound her to the waking world with a moniker of her own.

Emmi.

For almost a year their paths were intertwined. Annalise taught her more of those right and proper ways and did her best to teach her to speak well. She'd cleaned Emmi up, cut her wild hair and found her clothes. She brought her into settlements as they traveled, leaving behind Emmi's precious pond, and showed her what to watch for in their fellow humans, to see if they should be trusted, manipulated, or just avoided.

If they were around other humans, Emmi was not to respond to anything that the magics might whisper to her. She was not to address that which couldn't be seen and she was expected to reply to those who could in a timely manner.

The latter was the most frustrating. Though the former should have been, Emmi found it easier and easier to pretend that the voices were not there, so much so that there were times when she forgot them all together, only to be startled by a quick whisper of a shout for her attention. That always caused looks from those around them and a cross glare from Annalise.

However, the woman was often equally frustrated during their lessons in the fade, where Emmit taught her to watch for signs of demons or pathways that were inhabited by creatures that ought to be left alone. However, even as Annalise enthusiastically committed her warnings to memory, Emmi felt disturbed by their surroundings. They were changing in ways she couldn't explain and in truth, she wasn't even sure what it was about them that was different. They felt so distant.

Despite her original thoughts of the woman, Emmi grew fond of Annalise, forgetting her original scorn for being torn away from her beloved forest home, and allowed herself to be drawn more and more into the waking world, falling back into the fade to find it was oddly quiet.

She came to think of the woman as her mother.

And then the templars had found them and cut her down.

In her dying moments, Annalise had finally been able to hear what had always whispered to Emmi and as she realized how much of the world fell deaf to her, it had dawned on her how their interactions had damned the small child. There was no way to separate that world of magic from the world of mortals and there was no way that a child would be able to keep apart all the different nuances. A creature such as Emmi should have been left alone in the wild, free to follow the call of the ethereal on her whim. In the world of man, her abilities would mark her a demon and kill her.

In a vain attempt to somehow right the damage she had done, Annalise had raised a finger to her lips and offered a soft 'shhh' as she'd been cut down, praying to Andraste and the magics around them both that Emmi would understand.

It was unnecessary. Even as she lost the only person who had ever made her tethers to the world of flesh worthwhile, the voices around her had screamed of their warnings. Of loneliness and heartbreak.

Emmi recalled her lessons from Annalise. She understood that the templars killed mages who used magic wantonly. She understood that it was their job to slay those who fell to the promises of demons. But she didn't understand why they'd killed Annalise, for neither of those reasons justified her mother's death.

If she had been able to grasp the simple concept of apostate, she'd have hidden her abilities all together. As her mother had told her, magic could be dangerous.

She had never explained to her, though, that it was fear, and not a simple sense of duty, that drove the templars' blades home. Emmi had sought to use her magic in a nonthreatening manner, to show them that she was nothing to fret over. That was why she'd enchanted the dish rag to help her with the dishes.

When the Revered Mother they'd brought her to broke out into a fearful panic, it had left her more confused than not. Had she thought it was a ghost helping her? A demon maybe?

In only a year, she'd forgotten so much. Who had told her that demons were only dangerous to those with weak resolve? Surely a child such as herself had to have heard such wisdom from someone else. Her mother must have said it.

She remembered voices in the night, in the light, in the earth and sky, but she could barely hear them. She was too much a part of the world of flesh. She'd thought that she could live in both worlds, live with Annalise, but with her gone, everything magical became forbidden.

Even making pebbles dance as a way to pass the time.

As she'd settled into her life in the tower, she'd slept constantly. Depression they'd called it and left her be, for surely someone as small as she had not been able to breach the mental barriers to the fade. And after all, lyrium was needed for such wanderings, wasn't it?

She wandered the paths, terrified by how quiet they'd become. And finally, she'd broken down. To lose Annalise hurt, but to lose touch with the magics, who barely whispered to her anymore, had been an unbearable thought.

Her pathways were beginning to fade away, a sign that she was waking up, when a thought had struck her. Instead of allowing the sleep to seep away, she'd flung herself off the path. Annalise had always been worried about who might be on the paths, what had made them, where they might lead…so much so that Emmi had begun to do so as well.

That was her mistake. To assume that there truly were paths. The fade was an entire world, not a series of winding walkways. As her feet stepped into nothing and her remembrance of her physical form faded away—another hindrance to existing there was to remember that you existed elsewhere—the voices had overwhelmed her, welcoming her back.

There were no arms to wrap around her and a small realization that she would never be truly free from the waking world added a melancholy air to the reunion, but if a lonely tug was all that would keep her memories of Annalise, then Emmi would accept that.

When she finally woke up, she'd found that she could hear her precious whispers almost as easily in the waking world as in the sleeping one.

The spells around her were ancient and they knew more of the men who hunted mages than the ones who had originally sung to her. They warned her of excelling in magic, of disobeying the templars openly. They told her that her world was neither of flesh nor dreams, but something in between and they whispered that they would stay with her, to keep her from being lonely.

Even so, she had longed to share her life with another mortal. Surely she could find another like herself, intertwined with magic in such a way that most never came to understand. That was why she'd reached out to the others, to Jowan.

And when he'd come to her, years later, with his plan to escape the tower, she had felt a little lost. There had always been a small part of her that had hoped that one day he'd find his way to her and that they could enjoy the secret of the world all around them, the world that the templars would probably die from fright of. However, he had already found someone to share his world with.

While she cared nothing for Lily, she'd hated the thought of Jowan being miserable, losing his ability to feel. And so she'd broken all the rules, ignoring the warnings and pleas of the magics around her. She'd helped him break into the repository and destroy his phylactery, even though the templars were already whispering about her for completing the Harrowing faster than any mage prior—after all, she'd been walking the fade for so long it was easy for her to tell what was a demon and what wasn't.

And when they'd emerged to find the First Enchanter and the Knight-Commander waiting? When that had happened, she'd ruined her carefully crafted façade.

Emmi's abilities came less from being able to control magic and more from being able to interact with it. No, her spells weren't as flashy or powerful as her fellow mages. She couldn't conjure an inferno.

All she needed to do was ask the magic around her to do it for her.

It was such a plea she'd offered then, as the templars closed in to drag all of them off, though rather than fire, she begged for light. Enough to blind those present and to give Jowan and Lily the chance to escape.

Another whisper of magic followed the love birds in her guise, to keep their pace swift lest they realize they'd abandoned their friend. It didn't fade until they were well free from the tower. As they'd stopped to rest near the banks of Lake Calenhad, the spell had dispersed with a melancholy smile and a nod toward them.

Emmi's fate was not bound to theirs and as much as she cared for Jowan, she was not about to tether herself to a life of constant running or a life of watching someone she cared about find peace with another.

Even as Greagoir flounder for the appropriate curses on her name, her power, and her insolence and Irving's frown implied that he thought she was foolish for aiding Jowan—she had to say she was more surprised that he wasn't startled by her abilities, though, she supposed he was the First Enchanter for a reason—a voice had cut in, offering a twist of fate that Emmi was certain the arcane had to have whispered into his subconscious.

"If I may offer another solution," the tower's guest, Duncan, had spoken, a firmness and dedication in his voice. Prior to his interjection, she had never seen words from that mortal tongue hold any true sway over another's actions. Rather, it had always been knowledge of what might come after those words, of the actions they implied which stayed hands or broke up groups of apprentices from trying to levitate a chair out a window. It intrigued her to see how the highest authorities she knew gave pause if only to hear this man speak.

"First Enchanter Irving spoke highly of this mage and I would like her to join the Grey Wardens."


End file.
